trademark

Marc Trachtenberg, a Chicago attorney who specializes in social media, marketing, copyright, privacy issues and Internet stuff in general has launched his own social media monitoring tool called Brand Vigil. The idea is to help his clients protect their copyright material from being freely traded on the various social media networks. Trachtenberg got the idea after being besieged by clients to help them understand social media and how it might impact them. With social media growing by leaps and bounds, no doubt Brand Vigil will be highly in demand.

According to Trachtenberg, a “significant portion” of his practice involves advising clients about social media. “I searched for a social media monitoring service that I could use for my clients that would identify uses of brands anywhere in the username, account name, and profile, and to my surprise, there was nothing else out there that did it even though there was an incredible need for it,” he remembers. “So, being the entrepreneurial person that I am and a former software consultant, I decided to create it myself.”

Trachtenberg said among the “clutter” there “tends to be two types of products” that do social media monitoring. “The first type is like Radian6, which monitors for all instances of a brand and certain preselected keywords anywhere in any post or tweet to measure consumer engagement with a brand,” he says. “This might identify some negative comments about the brand, but is not going to identify the biggest threats to the brands and potential sources of legal liability for the brand owner.”